• New York Magazine shares a slideshow of inspiring entries to a design competition for a new AIDS memorial near New York City’s St. Vincent’s Hospital, where many AIDS patients lost their lives in the 1980s. Jury chairman Michael Arad, designer of the World Trade Center memorial, asks, “How do you create a memorial to victims, some of whom have yet to be born?” Almost 500 architects responded to the call.

• How does a city’s landscape reflect the thoughts and feelings of its inhabitants? Director João Wainer’s 2009 documentary Pixo considers the cityscapes of São Paulo and the rise of pichação. Pichação is a form of graffiti in which youth climb to precarious urban heights, leaving their mark with spray paint—pointedly in defiance of city authorities’ efforts to eradicate “visual pollution.”

• So you love buildings. But would you marry one? This week, anti-gentrification protester Baylonia Aivaz did just that with an abandoned building in Seattle that is slated for demolition, for what is to be a new apartment complex. The Los Angeles Times reports: “She was clad in a long white wedding dress and standing near a bulldozer as a ukulele player strummed ‘Lean on Me.'”